December 22, 2011

New Particle Reported By LHC Scientists

Scientists said on Thursday that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has turned up a heavier variant of a sub-atomic particle first discovered 25 years ago.

The researchers said the Chi-b(3P) was uncovered in the debris from colliding protons. It is a boson particle like the Higgs and the photon, which are particles that help form the nucleus of atoms.

The Chi-b(3) comprises of two heavy particles, the beauty quark and its antiquark. These are bound together by a "strong" force, according to the physicists working on the experiment.

"The Chi-b(3P) is a particle that was predicted by many theorists, but was not observed at previous experiments," James Walder, a British physicist quoted by the University of Birmingham said in a press release.

The find was made using data from the ATLAS experiment, which announced last week that it may have seen the first glimpse of the Higgs Boson particle.

Scientists say that the discovery of the Chi-b(3) may help them in their continued search for the Higgs Boson.

"While people are rightly interested in the Higgs boson, which we believe gives particles their mass and may have started to reveal itself, a lot of the mass of everyday objects comes from the strong interaction we are investigating using the Chi-b(3)," Professor Roger Jones, Head of the Lancaster University ATLAS group said in a statement.

The LHC is designed to help scientists fill in gaps in the Standard Model. This is the current model scientists use to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles.